Friday, May 14, 2010

Kingman UFO Crash

Not long ago someone asked about the Kingman, Arizona crash of May 1953. I hesitated answering the query simply because my new book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky was about to be published and the answer could be found there. And yes, that was a shameless plug.

Most people know that this story has been circulating from the 1970s when Ray Fowler published the information he had in Official UFO. Most of the story then came from Arthur Stancil whom Fowler had called Fritz Werner in the article in order to protect Stancil’s identity.

Stancil said that he had been involved in a top-secret, preliminary survey of a wrecked UFO somewhere in the desert around Kingman. Stancil’s credentials seemed good and there was limited documentation, but nothing solid. Besides, Stancil had been caught telling multiple versions of the tale and claimed that when he had been drinking he tended to embellish stories. That certainly didn’t bode well for the tale.

In the intervening years there have been some others who talked of the crash, and I’ll let you all look that information up in Crash. What I want to talk about is the Judie Woolcott story that suggested to me that there might be something important here.

Woolcott said that her husband, a professional military officer, was on duty at the air base control tower somewhere around the Kingman area. They had been tracking something on radar when it lost altitude, seemed to disappear and then, in the distance, there was a bright flash of white light.

So, okay, something crashed. Military police, according to Woolcott began talking about something being down and they drove out in the general direction of the flash. They found a domed disk stuck in the ground.

Woolcott had gotten these details from a letter that her husband had sent her from Vietnam. He indicated that he knew more, but he didn’t want to write it down. Yes, it seems odd that he would send such a letter from Vietnam, but then guys in a combat environment do some strange things.

While the letter would be an important document, it certainly wouldn’t prove the crash real. Unfortunately, the letter was lost and we only have Woolcott’s memory of it.

But that’s not the worst part. In today’s world there are all sorts of databases available and there is one that lists every American soldier who died during the Vietnam War... including those non-combat related deaths. The only Woolcott listed is a PFC, Randall Woolcott, who was born in 1948 and died in Vietnam before his 20th birthday. He was unmarried.

But, I have learned that Judie Woolcott had been married a number of times and her UFO spotting husband’s name might not have been Woolcott. In her obituary, she was Judith Anne Woolcott (Miller, Fingal). New searches of the databases have failed to produce any corroboration for her story and that suggests this tale is not accurate.

So, where does that leave us? Well, Stancil provided a copy of his desk calendar that shows him on some unidentified assignment on May 21, 1953, but that doesn’t really tell us much and doesn’t really confirm his tale. There are a couple of other witnesses, but their stories are dubious and the dates don’t track, though they both mention Kingman.

The Woolcott story has imploded, which means that it simply is not reliable, given the history there. If she had been able to produce the letter, then that would have been something. But she lost it.

Other attempts at verification have failed. Maybe we should make another attempt to verify something, but the odds are stacked against us. We have no Yearbook like Walter Haut supplied us for Roswell that held hundreds of potential witnesses. We have no newspaper stories like those for Kecksburg and Shag Harbour that helped pin down the tales and name the witnesses. We have no real corroboration. Just a couple of vague stories.

It seems the thread is about played out on Kingman... but that doesn’t mean the story will die. Someone will come up with something to revitalize the Kingman crash, and that might be the most frightening aspect of all.

38 comments:

"But, I have learned that Judie Woolcott had been married a number of times and her UFO spotting husband’s name might not have been Woolcott. In her obituary, she was Judith Anne Woolcott (Miller, Fingal). New searches of the databases have failed to produce any corroboration for her story and that suggests this tale is not accurate."

Does this mean that searches couldn't turn up the other husbands' names, or they were found and their histories don't match Woolcott's story? If it's the former, then I wouldn't say her story has imploded, just that it can't be verified.

I agree that there is very little to go on here, unlike cases like Roswell, Shag Harbour, or Kecksburg. If the crash happened, it was too isolated to produce many witnesses and no local news stories. That is the frustration with most of the crashed saucer stories--usually only one or two witnesses and nothing else. 1941/42 Cape Girardeau is one such example.

Where did this Judie Woolcott come from? Did she hear of or read the story and then spring from the woodwork to 'corroborate' it? Did her husband's letter from Vietnam exist or did she invent it?

Kevin: you surely realise that this crashed saucer tale is a phony. Why would anyone try and promote it now? In the end it suffers from the same lack of evidence that all the others do (including Roswell), i.e. no hardware, bodies or documentation. And the time lapse since the event? A mere 56 years of official cover-up, as opposed to 63 for Roswell! Even Rendlesham is getting stale, being 'only' 30 years old this year. Come on Kevin, let's have some recent crashes. By the way, about that one that occurred near my place yesterday.....

Sometimes it just doesn't help to be subtle. I have found no evidence that there was a soldier, sailor, airman or marine killed in Vietnam who matches the details provided by Woolcott...

I'm sorry but I have no faith in this story. Stancil himself said that he embellished stories when he had been drinking and the story as he originally told it does not match that he had given to Ray Fowler.

There simply is nothing to go on here other than the second-hand tale that can't be verified and the ramblings of a man who admitted he told stories when he was drinking.

Also: I have been doing a lot of research into the whole "Werner" story over the last year, and found a lot of material linking him to the Upshot-Knothole atomic tests that occurred in the same time-frame at the Nevada test site.

One of the experiments done as part of the U-K tests was to remotely fly drone aircraft through the mushroom clouds with monkeys on board. I have the official files on this, and I have verbal testimony (but not yet documentation) that one of these drones crashed somewhere near the Nevada/Arizona border.

Could this be the genesis of the Kingman story? I don't know, but as I now have substantial files on the monket flights in Nevada in 53, I'm continuing to dig into it and will provide an update if more surfaces.

And of course, a drone aircraft with small bodies (but monkeys) - and where there was some degree of secrecy because it was tied in with experimentation to determine how aircrews might be affected by radiation exposure in a WW3-type situation - might (and i stress might) be indicative of a link.

According to Jenny Randles in her book'UFO Retrievals' researchers Len Stringfield and Charles Wilhelmas well as Richard Hall were given accounts from 1st and 2nd hand witnesses of a 'ufo' crash in Arizona in 1953. This case, while tenuous,should not be closed.

In my book, I go into much more detail about all this. I looked at what Len wrote in his "Retrievals of the Third Kind," telling us that Charles Wilhelm told him that Wilhelm's father had talked to a "Major Daly" who, in April 1953 (not May) had gone to an unknown location to look at the remains of a flying saucer.

Len, in his "UFO Crash Retrievals: A Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors," wrote about a witness he called JLD... who got his information from a close relative...

These are classic a "friend of a friend" stories. We've removed from the original source by two or three layers. It is second or third-hand information and does nothing other than clutter the landscape with data that can't be verified.

As I say, I go into greater detail in my book...

BTW john... thanks for the opportunity to mention the book time and again.

Nick Redfern wrote:One of the experiments done as part of the U-K tests was to remotely fly drone aircraft through the mushroom clouds with monkeys on board. I have the official files on this, and I have verbal testimony (but not yet documentation) that one of these drones crashed somewhere near the Nevada/Arizona border.

Could this be the genesis of the Kingman story? I don't know, but as I now have substantial files on the monket flights in Nevada in 53, I'm continuing to dig into it and will provide an update if more surfaces.

Big difference between flying drones through radioactive clouds at the Nevada Test Site and drones going rogue and crashing 110-150 miles away near the NV/AZ border or closer in to Kingman.

Would they even be fueled to get that far, even if you assume one somehow got away?

More likely such drone flights would be designed to be very short, taking off and landing at a nearby airstrip at the NTS itself or maybe Indian Springs, 45 miles NW of Las Vegas, and about 30-40 miles from where the A-bomb testing took place.

I also find it strange how your sources always seem to come up with scenarios where they constantly lose control of their flights, be it monkeys in drones or hostile Kamikaze pilots or deformed children or Chinese victims of WWII Japanese medical experiments suspended from balloons.

I hope your verbal sources aren't the same old counterintel people you used in your "BS in the Desert" book because this has all the indications of another nonsense story.

Also: A FOIA document titled "Early Cloud Penetration", dated January 27, 1956, and prepared by the Air Research and Development Command at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, states in part:

“In the event of nuclear warfare the AF is confronted with two special problems. First is the hazard to flight crews who may be forced to fly through an atomic cloud. Second is the hazard to ground crews who maintain the aircraft after it has flown through the cloud…In the 1953 Upshot-Knothole tests, monkeys were used so that experiments could be conducted on larger animals nearer the size of man. QF-80 drone aircraft were used, their speed more nearly approximating that of current operational aircraft.”

I got the above via FOIA, and it can also be found at the National Archives, Maryland.

You also say: "Your sources always seem to come up with scenarios..."

Er...of the 19 books I've written, I wrote one book using off-the-record sources. That's it. And that was 5 years ago (Body Snatchers, 2005).

And, there was a whole variety of people and sources who told of a Japanese link to Roswell long before me: Stringfield (1991) Popular Mechanics (1997) etc etc.

Also: Australian researcher Keith Basterfield was given the same story as me, but 6 months before Body Snatchers was published.

You may not agree with the info in Snatchers, but the fact is that the story is not dependent on the people I spoke with - the story had a life long before Body Snatchers.

Nick Redfern wrote:I specifically said that I have the official files (FOIA) on the drone flights with the monkeys on-board - and photos too.

I never questioned the drone flights (which were, e.g., also used back in Operation Crossroads in 1946), just the claim that they would totally lose control of such a drone and that it would crash all the way in Arizona and supposedly trigger the Kingman saucer crash stories over 20 years later. Sounded like bunk when I first heard it, and still sounds like bunk the more I look into it.

It turns out these flights were not all that secret, and details of what happened to the April 1953 drone flights were published in the very public 1955 Flight Magazine. (The only important thing that seems to have been left out was the use of test animals):

http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1955/1955%20-%200680.html

“The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission has released some details of the use of three Lockheed QF-80 radio-controlled drones as data-collectors during …the explosion of an atomic device at the Nevada test site on April 15th.

“The three pilotless aircraft… took off from Indian Springs AFB [as I noted in my first comment, this would have been the likely source of these flights] under the control of a ground director alongside the runway. In attendance on each, and read to take over when the drone was airborne, were two DT-33 director aircraft and two ‘chase planes’…

“When the three formations reached the test area, control was handed over to three ground radar station, the manned aircraft retiring to holding points several miles away. The planned operation was for the surviving drones—if any—to be picked up again by the director aircraft and shepherded back to their base. It was the duty of the ‘chase planes’ to come alongside the drones and photograph any damage or other effects.

“…the plan was ‘successfully executed in every respect.’ [What, no lost drones crashing in Arizona?]

“One of the QF-80 was lost on take-off but was replaced immediately by a stand-by. It was planned that two of the drones would be lost, parachuting the effects data they had collected to the ground for helicopter recovery. All three aircraft survived the immediately blast effects, but two of them were seriously damaged. One was crash-landed on a dry lake bed near Indian Springs AFB by its directory aircraft, while the other was lost in the mountains to the east of Indian Springs. The third was landed intact at Indian Springs.”

It looks like the only one of these with a remote chance of being the source of the crash rumor was the one that crashed in the mountains east of Indian Springs. It was said to be badly damaged from flying through the cloud of the A-bomb blast, probably in the same way that jet engines are damaged when they fly through the ash clouds of volcanoes, as recently in the news. It was also still a long way from Arizona and with damaged engines very unlikely to get there in any scenario. In addition, for safety reasons, I doubt these drones were fueled to fly much beyond Indian Springs (as I noted in my previous post), the chase planes would have shot it down in a remote area if they couldn’t control it, to avoid the possibility of it crashing into a populated area, in particular Las Vegas, if the drone really were headed SE towards Arizona & Kingman.

(part 2)As for the one source who spoke about the crash - this came from the daughter of an Upshot-Knothole worker, who I am working with to try and take this further. She's not someone with any official ties at all. Just got the "monkey crash" story from her dad years ago.

Three of the four drones with monkeys and mice on-board crashed at or near Indian Springs AFB, which is probably the basis of her father’s story. I don’t see anything here remotely resembling one of the drones flying into Arizona and somehow triggering the much-later story of the Kingman crash, all of which seems highly, highly improbable. A drone with probably damaged engines from flying through an A-bomb cloud and probably on restricted fuel and being followed by chase planes will not be able to get that far, or allowed to, to prevent possible overflight and crash into Las Vegas on its way to Arizona.

Aspects of the story re the monkey tests at least can be found on-line here:

Which details the use of monkeys and mice and the results, but doesn’t tell us anything useful about what happened to the drones, or any indication that they could have been connected with the Kingman crash story.

Also: A FOIA document titled "Early Cloud Penetration", dated January 27, 1956, and prepared by the Air Research and Development Command at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, states in part:

“In the event of nuclear warfare the AF is confronted with two special problems. First is the hazard to flight crews who may be forced to fly through an atomic cloud. Second is the hazard to ground crews who maintain the aircraft after it has flown through the cloud…In the 1953 Upshot-Knothole tests, monkeys were used so that experiments could be conducted on larger animals nearer the size of man. QF-80 drone aircraft were used, their speed more nearly approximating that of current operational aircraft.”

I got the above via FOIA, and it can also be found at the National Archives, Maryland.

To reiterate, I didn’t question the use of drones or experimental animals in the A-bomb tests (which already went back to at least 1946), just how you have again taken so little and blown it all out of proportion.

I also saw you use documents in this way in your “BS in the Desert” book, claiming they were “corroboration” for the balloon/Japanese-Kamikaze/deformed children/Chinese-victims-of-Japanese-criminal-medical-experiments story of your obvious counterintel BS “whistleblowers”.

The above-cited document has nothing to do with the ultimate fate of the drones or demonstrating that they could have any way reached Arizona or had any connection with the much later Flagstaff, Arizona saucer crash story of “Fritz Werner” and others. I can’t think of a more pointless or useless “cover story” for not-much-of-a-secret (use of animals in A-bomb radiation monitoring—yawn!)

You also say: "Your sources always seem to come up with scenarios..."

Er...of the 19 books I've written, I wrote one book using off-the-record sources. That's it. And that was 5 years ago (Body Snatchers, 2005).

I thought it obvious that I was referring to Body Snatchers and your use of admitted counter-intel sources telling a highly inconsistent and ever-changing story of what was supposedly behind the Roswell crash—errant balloon flights using humans that they somehow could never keep track of.

(part 3)And, there was a whole variety of people and sources who told of a Japanese link to Roswell long before me: Stringfield (1991) Popular Mechanics (1997) etc etc.

No there was not “a whole variety of people and sources”. Source of the very vague Stringfield story (about one or two sentences long): Timothy Cooper, same guy who released a bunch of newer MJ-12 papers, some clearly bogus, supposedly coming from more unnamed “whistleblowers”.

Popular Mechanics—writer Jim Wilson, who has written other total BS about Roswell. His information source—who knows? Maybe he made the whole thing up on his own or was fed the same garbage to muddy up Roswell on its 50th anniversary, along with the new, improved crash dummy story coming out through official AF channels.

“Etc., etc.”?? Don’t know about that. None of this stuff ever rose above the level of highly questionable and rumors, certainly not backed by real documents, solid witnesses with real names, real pedigrees, and no obvious axe to grind, etc.

Also: Australian researcher Keith Basterfield was given the same story as me, but 6 months before Body Snatchers was published.

And his source was….? According to you in an interview, “by a guy whose father worked in British Intelligence”, who even if real, got it from where and with what reliability? Sounds at best maybe a fourth- or fifth-hand account.

And wasn’t this already several years after you claimed you were first approached with the story by your unnamed counter-intel sources? I fail to see how such a seriously weak account serves as any sort of decent corroboration for your “BS in the Desert” story.

You may not agree with the info in Snatchers, but the fact is that the story is not dependent on the people I spoke with - the story had a life long before Body Snatchers.

By “life” you mean a few minor rumors, never substantiated in any way, either no-named or very questionable sources, etc. Sounds like just another long con to me to confuse things even further.

What bothers me is not your discussion of the stories, but your consistent lack of critical thinking or sense of skepticism considering how extremely thin any of these stories are. Instead you hype them as valid hypotheses, instead of something, at best, that should be resigned to low-level, gray basket status.

At 0505 hours on May 19, 1953 an atomic test named "Harry" was detonated at Yucca Flats. That single detonation was responsible for 1/3 of the entire gamma exposure caused by these tests.

On the night of May 19, 1953 a double murder occurred in the tiny town of Silver Creek Ariz, near Oatman Ariz. The killer/s were never apprehended. Silver Creek is not on the map anymore.

I have been gathering information for a fictional novel that ties these two actual events to the Stancil information. Facts here are few and far between. I have interviewed ranchers and others who were living in Kingman at the time and not even one of them remembered anything about a plane crash or similar event in May of 1953.

As for Keith Basterfield's source: I have spoken with him extensively, as Keith put me in touch with him after the book was published.

Keith too had interviewed him extensively.

Also: you may not have seen my paper on post-Body Snatchers revelations that surfaced since the book was published in Greg Taylor's "Darklore" anthology.

That chapter includes FOIA documents on a young boy who died in Lincoln County in the 40s from a form of plague.

The official documents refer to whether his death could have been due to a Japanese balloon and biowar weaponry developed by Unit 731.

This is a clear link between not just New Mexico, but Lincoln County, no less and Unit 731. These documents surfaced around 2007/8.

The body of the boy was taken to Fort Stanton, where Japanese POWs were held in the war.

Does this prove anything? No: just an official, FOIA documented link between Unit 731 and a death in Lincoln County, NM.

I will be doing a bigger paper on this in the near future, as there are now more documents on the boy's death, and will be including images of the documents, file numbers etc.

In the meantime, the text of the relevant parts of the documents that had surfaced at the time I wrote the Darklore paper, are all in that paper, word-for-word.

Yes, the Kingman/crash/monkey story only has one source so far. But she has her father's papers, and work colleagues names and I have those to work with, and more, and will be doing an update on that when I've gone as far as I can.

But the fact is that, so far, we can tie "Werner" to Upshot-Knothole; we know that "Werner" talked about a crash and a small body; we have a woman talking about her dad linked to Upshot-Knothole and recovering a crashed vehicle and monkey (small, in other words) bodies (in the same time frame), and - in case you don't know - in the very first contact between "Werner" and the 2 young guys who interviewed him, "Werner" said the object was a classified military experimental vehicle - not a UFO.

Again, proves nothing. But, to me, that is all at least suggestive of being worthy of looking into it further.

Stancil wouldn't have confused the drones with monkeys for an ET crash--unless he was drunk, in which case he probably wouldn't have ben allowed into the test area, lol. He wasn't some ignorant dope who, unaware of the project, might've mistaken them for a UFO. Maybe drones and monkeys later gave Stancil the idea for a crashed saucer hoax but that sounds silly, because they were superfluous. There have been crash stories in popular literature since Scully's 1950 book.

Nick Redfern wrote:Also: you may not have seen my paper on post-Body Snatchers revelations that surfaced since the book was published in Greg Taylor's "Darklore" anthology.

That chapter includes FOIA documents on a young boy who died in Lincoln County in the 40s from a form of plague.

The official documents refer to whether his death could have been due to a Japanese balloon and biowar weaponry developed by Unit 731.

This is a clear link between not just New Mexico, but Lincoln County, no less and Unit 731. These documents surfaced around 2007/8.

The body of the boy was taken to Fort Stanton, where Japanese POWs were held in the war.

Does this prove anything? No: just an official, FOIA documented link between Unit 731 and a death in Lincoln County, NM.

Here's yet another example of where you take a totally unrelated document and use it as some sort of "corroboration" for your "BS in the Desert" scenario.

Let's see, we have buzzwords like FOIA, Japanese balloons, Unit 731, Japanese POWs at Fort Stanton in Lincoln County. Throw it all together in the blender and obviously it points to an explanation for Roswell several years later--deformed survivors of Japanese Unit 731 or POW Japanese Kamikaze pilots being used in Japanese-derived balloon experiments that crash in Lincoln County.

You said it yourself. Not only doesn't it prove anything, it has absolutely nothing to do with Roswell. Here's what the document is really about. During WWII the Japanese were sending over balloon fire bombs, but authorities here had some awareness of the Japanese bacteriological warfare group known as Unit 731 in Manchuria. The great fear was that the Japanese would use the same balloons for germ warfare (in fact there were such plans).

Thus when some kid in N.M. got the rare plague, there were worries that the Japanese may have indeed started using the balloons in germ warfare.

And that's all it is about. Spinning this into some sort of corroboration for your Roswell theories is total nonsense. But you have done that with many other documents as well, documents that have nothing to do with Roswell.

E.g., if the aeromedical people were concerned about cosmic ray radiation effects on crews in long-term high-altitude flying, somehow that becomes support for flying an atomic reactor from a high-altitude balloon and exposing human guinea pigs to the radiation.

Bunk piled on top of bunk. Nick, you do your best work when you stick to real facts, and don't deal in this super-speculative garbage where you add 2 plus 2 and end up with 13. Dots miles apart don't deserve to be connected.

Yes, I did say it doesn't prove anything. I don't deny that. I would hardly have said it if I didn't think that!

But, when I heard (in the wake of the publication of Body Snatchers in 2005) from people such as yourself stating that there is no evidence of a Unit 731 link to the events at Lincoln County...but then I find official files talking about Japanese balloon flights over Lincoln County (yes: not just vague references to balloon attacks on the US or even vague references to attacks on the state of New Mexico...but over Lincoln County itself, and where Unit 731 is mentioned in the same document), yes I do think it's worth following further.

And maybe those dots will lead somewhere, and maybe they won't.

But, ignoring what is, at the absolute very least, an extraordinary coincidence (considering when these documents surfaced - at least 2 years after Body Snatchers was publised), would be stupid.

Also, on the topic of Fort Stanton, one book that gets little coverage commentary is "Roswell - A Quest for the Truth," written by John A. Price in 1997.

On pages 31-32 of the book, Price recalls how, in 1978, and while working as a roofer at Hingerman (a small town southeast of Roswell), he witnessed at one particular home several unusual-looking, deformed children.

In Price's own words, they were around "four and one-half feet tall," "had larger heads;" and "were completely hairless." Also: "...their noses and ears were very small."

Interestingly, he added: "They were the closest I've ever seen who looked alien to me. I knew they were not."

Further on in the book (in a chapter specifically titled Was it Ours?), Price quotes from the letter of a man who advised him that "...the aliens I was looking for were at Fort Stanton."

The letter-writer added to Price that with respect to Fort Stanton: "...There were some pretty deformed young men there...mongoloid large heads, small ears, pin heads who could function and had shrill voices. They were supposed to be of incest, but from their looks - Outa-space."

Well Nick, let us look at all the various alleged "Roswell aliens" you have proposed, in alleged highly criminal military experiments in alleged high altitude balloons, some with alleged nuclear reactors:

1. Alleged tiny Japanese POW Kamikaze pilots allegedly still being held 2 years after the war's end. ("Tough little f----rs!" according to your counterintel alleged "whistleblower")

2. Alleged deformed Chinese survivors of the Japanese Unit 731 in Manchuria (even though there are no records of any survivors of such experiments or the fact that the Japanese used normal people in their experiments or the fact that the Russians, not Americans, overran the Japanese in China)

3. Alleged genetically deformed and retarded children from various mental institutions in New Mexico, the closer to Roswell or Lincoln County the better.

I'm surprised you haven't thrown the small Munchkin cast of the Wizard of Oz into the mix or every deformed/retarded child or circus side-show freak in existence--maybe because you couldn't tie Roswell/Lincoln County to them some time in the last 100 years with some totally irrelevant FOIA document.

Yes there is a good deal of BS in UFO research, and your various grasping-at-straws Roswell alien candidates are perfect examples.

The only time I ever agreed with Karl Pflock about anything was his rebranding of your "Body Snatchers" book as "BS in the Desert". If a hard-core Roswell debunker like Pflock couldn't stomach the nonsense of Body Snatchers, that says a lot. Pflock would use any lame excuse possible to dismiss Roswell, but Body Snatchers was just too much, even for him.

As per usual David, we will continue to disagree. You will keep looking into the UFO angle and I won't. You will continue to accept the ET angle and I won't. Maybe one day we'll have the full story, or maybe we won't. Either way, when it comes to Roswell, we'll never agree. That's Ufology.

Rather ironically, me and Karl were working on a book before he died called "Silas the Magnificent," a bio on Silas Newton, that would have had the Aztec story at its heart. We got a few chapters done, and a full synopsis done, but it fell apart when Karl got sicker.

We cordially worked on this for a month or two after BS (how many times do you feel the need to reiterate what you mean when you refer to Body Snatchers as BS - I think everyone gets it by now...) was published, and before his health worsened.

No, he didn't agree with the data in the book, but for a while he wasn't against the idea of some cold-war experiment borne out of the whole radiation experiment issue.

..."Alleged genetically deformed and retarded children from various mental institutions in New Mexico, the closer to Roswell or Lincoln County the better...."

...that came from John Price's book. Someone should chase that down with him.

By the way, I have a great photo of none other than William Randolph "Randy" Lovelace taken at Fort Stanton (date unknown, but taken outside the main-building and with 2 "suits" and 2 military types around him, all with big smiles).

I recommend you read more on Lovelace...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Lovelace_II

Does this prove anything (before you ask)? No!

But, we have someone at an installation that held handicapped and Japanese people, and who was deeply involved in matters of a high-altitude/aerospace medicine nature.

Again, proves nothing; but for me, worthy of further research to find why he was there...just down the road from where all the Roswell fuss kicked off...

..."Alleged genetically deformed and retarded children from various mental institutions in New Mexico, the closer to Roswell or Lincoln County the better...."

...that came from John Price's book. Someone should chase that down with him.

Sheesh! No one questions the existence of genetically deformed and retarded individuals, many of them hidden away at institutions. There were even some in Lincoln County and near Roswell. But so friggin' what? They exist everywhere in the world. From that you create this giant leap that somehow because they look abnormal and they exist they become automatic candidates for Roswell aliens. This sort of total illogic permeates many of your crashed saucer theories, be they Roswell or Kingman.

By the way, I have a great photo of none other than William Randolph "Randy" Lovelace taken at Fort Stanton (date unknown, but taken outside the main-building and with 2 "suits" and 2 military types around him, all with big smiles).

I recommend you read more on Lovelace...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Randolph_Lovelace_II

Does this prove anything (before you ask)? No!

No, of course not, so why bring it up?

But, we have someone at an installation that held handicapped and Japanese people, and who was deeply involved in matters of a high-altitude/aerospace medicine nature.

Again, proves nothing; but for me, worthy of further research to find why he was there...just down the road from where all the Roswell fuss kicked off...,

Nick, you remind me of someone who does a Google search with a few key words and comes up with a million "hits", thereby deduces they are somehow all connected to one another, instead of 99.999% of them being irrelevant and random garbage.

Any decent researcher will try to filter out most of the garbage with a little skepticism, logical & critical thinking, and just plain horse sense. I don't see any such filters in place for you, where it seems anything goes. Thinking outside of the box on occasion has its merits, but this is ridiculous.

Well, let's see, Robert Goddard did rocket tests near Roswell, and rocket fuel can be carcinogenic, leading to genetically deformed children, some of them housed near Roswell, and Dr. Lovelace was photographed visiting one such institution for totally unknown reasons. Also Goddard was friends with Charles Lindbergh, who supported his research, and Lindbergh has been linked with Roswell and being seen at the base in the time frame. Another connection is Lovelace, Lindbergh, and Goddard were all aviation pioneers and all have craters on the moon named for them. People hypothesize aliens may have bases on the moon. Did I mention that Nazi rocket scientists were heavily influenced by Goddard, and of course German V-2's were being tested at nearby White Sands, some of which would eventually carry monkeys, which might be confused with tiny space aliens by very drunk people. Therefore we shouldn't discount the possibility that Robert Goddard and his rocket experiments were ultimately responsible for the Roswell Incident and the reports of space aliens.

Just because I can connect everything in some absurdly obtuse way to Roswell, space, and aliens doesn't mean they really have anything to do with what happened at Roswell.

Again, we agree to differ. As it was when Body Snatchers was published, so it will always be for me and you.

There's only one way any of this will ever be rectified, and that's if undeniable proof of what happened at Roswell surfaces.

But that hasn't happened yet, and - as I note in the UFO Iconoclasts link I cited in an earlier comment in this very thread - I have extremely grave doubts that it ever will surface.

And by proof, I don't mean more testimony: I mean undeniable old files, undeniable old photos, a body.

If that undeniable proof doesn't surface, it at least means that UFO researchers can happily debate - 50 or 100 or 200 years from now - endlessly on whether a Mogul balloon came down, or why Marcel Sr. didn't show Marcel Jr. the memory-metal, or how many bodies were found at this site or that site, or if Corso was telling the truth or not.

Even I, having written a book on Roswell, have to admit that unless hard evidence of Roswell (in the form of definitive proof) surfaces, there is absolutely no doubt that 22nd Century and 23rd Century versions of me and you will be having this very same debate - if there is a Human Race still around (which I doubt), and if they even still care (which I also doubt).

In one sense, it's good that a genuinely intriguing 63 year old case can produce such interest (such as the 200-plus comments at some of the previous Roswell/crashed UFO posts at Kevin's blog).

On the other hand, however, I see so much energy spent on researchers arguing, moaning and name-calling about what happened at Roswell, instead of actually trying to find an alternative to hitting the endless brick-wall that prevents us getting proof of what happened Roswell.

And by proof, I mean the goods, the crown-jewels, etc. Without that, no-one outside of Ufology will ever really care.

Can Roswell be taken much further? I don't know. But, I do know that a hell of a lot of energy and emotion spent endlessly debating on the number of bodies, or how many crash-sites, or what Cavitt and Rickett actually saw and knew, could be better spent pursuing ways to get a real, meaningful in-road to the secret that someone is sitting on, somewhere in the depths of officialdom.

Nick:I am curious as to why you doubt that there will still be a human race in the 22nd and 23rd centuries. By that time it is probable that we shall have discovered genuine ET life elsewhere (although it is dangerous to make such predictions). If we do indeed discover such life, I suggest that Roswell will be entirely forgotten and we can then get on with the study of this ET intelligence and its ramifications for mankind. In fact ufology and ufologists will cease to exist at this point.

In other words, I predict that once REAL ETs are discovered Roswell will vanish from our thoughts, thankfully forever.

And yes, I totally agree that nothing can ever be proved about "Roswell is ET" until actual hardware or documentation is found.

"I am curious as to why you doubt that there will still be a human race in the 22nd and 23rd centuries."

Even if scenarios of nuclear annihilation and environmental catastrophe are wrong, futurists have long suggested that machine intelligence may eventually replace us. I don't think it'll be complete though, as humanity may also be enhanced.

"By that time it is probable that we shall have discovered genuine ET life elsewhere."

Really? If we can discover THEM in one or two centuries, why can't they be aware of us now? One thing is virtually certain. Terrestrial civilization is new, and far behind any other civilization. If we can find them in 1-2 centuries, they almost certainly found us LONG AGO. Your attitude reminds me of Sagan. He suggested contact via radio would happen in the FUTURE, and he pointed to an old legend of a fishlike creature as evidence of an ET visit in the PAST. But he rejected UFOlogy i.e. reports of aliens here and now. I don't think he really had the stomach for ETs. Either they were separated by vast distances or time, or he just couldn't deal with the topic.

Everywhere I go, I see fat diabetics shuffling around - and that includes kids of 10 or 11. Fat lumps of sugar-loaded lard who won't reach 50, and whose only bit of "exercise" is going from the bed to the breakfast table, etc.

I see an ever-increasing dumbing-down in education, and I think that our end will come due to falling life-spans (caused by the fact that massive amounts of unhealthy food, and an over-reliance on prescribed mood-altering meds that have side-effects worse than the things they're supposed to cure), general apathy, lethargy etc.

We'll psychologically and physically implode - not in a giant explosion or Hollywood type disaster movie. It will be a slow drift to extinction thanks to sugary drinks, fat kids who wont get off their fat arses and who become fat adults whose evn fatter kids wont be able to get off their arses even if they tried.

Science-fiction sometimes talks about scenarios of us having extended life-spans to 120/150 years etc.

From the way things are going, I'd say 50 years from now the life-span (in the US, at least) will be about 55. Unless the fattys change their ways and the kids do something beyond sit inside all day (whether at school or home).

LOL. By the skinny looks of the pesky Grays, those scrawny souls are seemingly very active, avoid soda drinks and actually move their limbs from time to time in that manner that used to be known to one and all as "walking" - a process that was once quite popular, but that is now nothing more than a fond and fading memory to many.

People say the Grays are on an evolutionary decline, but that's nothing compared to our decline and the rise of the Diabetic Fatties and Non-Walkers that threaten to engulf the world and dictate future human physical activity (or lack of it).

Hail those who guzzle 2-gallons of sugary pop per day! Hail those who shovel down gigantic amounts of cholestrol-loaded crap every day! Hail those for who going to the store means only ever doing drive-thru and not actually getting out of the car and walking into the store! Hail those who can't walk any more due to the weight they're carrying and who need motorized carts instead to haul their bulk around! Hail the ever-increasing rise of the Cart-People! Hail lower life-spans, more heart disease, more diabetes! Hail the day when the Human Race's legs whither away through lack of use! Hail the end!

I agree that "god" doesn't exist but extinction through obesity strikes me as temporocentric, lol. Sure, present society overconsumes, and these are the pretty much the doldrums of history. But just wait until there's an economic collapse, stemming in part from vast debt, or the unsustainability of overconsumption. Fundamentally, decadence stems from present values carried to their logical extreme. Extreme leisure and ssensual gratification are what the masses want, and get, through democracy. In the end that, not humanity, will be the casualty.

I'd have to disagree. My view is that even in a major economic collapse, those obsessed by vast amounts of food will still find a way to shovel it down - even if it means sacrificing something else, such as new clothes, the latest IPoD, computers etc etc.

For today's shovel-it-down society, the fast-food addiction will be the thing they hang on to until the very end; no matter what the economy.

You refer to decadence, extreme leisure and sensual gratification. I don't call sitting around, eating huge amounts, doing nothing but drive-thru and never walking again to any significant degree in that way as you. I call it sheer laziness.

I was reading an intreresting article a couple of weeks ago, about how the lifespan in the US has risen, but how with the rise of millions of blubber-kids, and the accompanying diabetes, heart-disease etc, the lifespan is likely to drop significantly as the 21st century progresses.

Coupled with the fact that I see numerous people hooked on meds for stress, depression and illnesses and conditions that people never heard of 20 years ago, I foresee nothing more in the future than obese, pill-popping shuffling-around lumps. Actually, I'm wrong. That's not the future. It's right now.

But, even though we disagree, it's an interesting (albeit distinctly off-topic!) debate!

I still, however, think it will be food, inactivity etc that will push millions and millions to early graves. And then what of their kids and theirs and theirs?

Did you see that film, WALL-E? (I think that's the spelling). That will be the future of the Human Race - fat, all driving carts. But unlike in WALL-E, there wont be a happy ending for us - just millions/billions in chronic bad health and dropping like flies.

Lol, I don't doubt that bad eating habits and inactivity will lead to high future mortality. But total extinction? No, not everybody is that stupid.Btw a major economic collapse may prevent a lot of food from reaching markets. In any event, I suggested that the fundamental problem is current values. The present system assumes the individual can make rational choices and do what's best for himself. Chronic health problems (among other issue)certainly argue otherwise, and call the present system into question. When economic, health etc crises finally get out of hand, the result IMO will be the end, not of humanity, but the democratic system which empowers the irresponsible masses. In most authoritarian societies, people remained thin, in spite of themselves. They just couldn't become obese or lazy because there just wasn't much junk food available. Very little of the national wealth was blown on it.

Kevin, Since Roswell has been mentioned, what do you think about the documents found in the Peabody Museum archives from Dr. Herbert Dick which place him and his archeology team at Bat Cave on the plains of San Augustin between the 1st and 14th of July in 1947? The documents seem to include letters from Dick to a faculty advisor on the status of his work. Since Dick denied being in New Mexico I was wondering about the difference between the story he told and the letters.

Kevin, Since Roswell has been mentioned, what do you think about the documents found in the Peabody Museum archives from Dr. Herbert Dick which place him and his archeology team at Bat Cave on the plains of San Augustin between the 1st and 14th of July in 1947? The documents seem to include letters from Dick to a faculty advisor on the status of his work. Since Dick denied being in New Mexico I was wondering about the difference between the story he told and the letters.

I was 7 years old on May 19, 1953 when Johnny Kramnicz and his partner William Cockburn were murdered at an isolated cabin located about 3.5 miles NW of Oatman, Arizona. My father and I knew both men personally. They owned a bar/drugstore in Oatman. About a week after the incident my father and I went to the crime scene. There were two 22 cal holes in the screen door. It looked to me like both men were probably reading in bed at night when they were shot in the head. My father suspected they were killed as part of a robbery attempt as it was rumored they had a stash of money from their successful business hidden somewhere on the property. The crime was never solved. An abandoned car was found a few miles away at the Silver Creek Spring, located only a short walk from Route 66 where someone could hitch a ride or walk back into Oatman or up the draw to nearby Goldroad. I lived in Oatman at the time and never heard any rumors or reports of crashed UFO's.